Edumacations

[CraigD]

Know what you mean. The least formally trained have a knack for figuring things out on their own. …

I agree. I’m disposed to hire a Physics, Chemistry, History – you name it, almost anything but CS – major who shows good basic programming skills over even advanced CS degree holders, even though my HR department gives me hell over it.

 

The following anecdote explains in part why.

 

In the late 1970s, the West Virginia, USA, Board of Regents (which directs WV’s public college system) signed off on an annual computer programming competition for undergraduate students. The “4-4-4” format was:

• One Saturday each year, during the regular academic year, each BOR school sends 4 students and 1 faculty member to one place, typically a suite of classrooms in the hosting school’s CS department.
  
• At 10:00 AM, each team’s faculty member goes to a separate room, and each team is given 4 printed 1-page programming problems (eg: compute the number of days between and 2 dates on the Julian calendar) describing an giving an example of an input file and the corresponding desired output file
  
• The teams may work on the 4 problems however they choose – assign one to each member, work on each in turn as a team, or any combination of these approaches
  
• Each team has access only to 4 terminals accessing an empty file space (no specialized libraries), a FORTRAN and a Pascal compiler, and the compilers’ electronic manuals. No other computers, calculators, or reference materials are allowed.
  
• The teams can compile and run the programs they want as many times as they want, using test data they create
  
• At any time, a team may copy the source code for any of the problems into a “submit” directory, and verbally tell the human monitor sitting in the hall outside that it’s ready to compile and run.
  
• The monitor tells another contest official, who compiles and runs the program with his own input file
  
• The team is told if the program succeeded or failed. If it failed, they are given the input and output files, told specifically what requirement(s) of the 1-page problem it failed, and shown where in the output file the failure(s) occurred, but offered no advice on how to correct it.
  
• After 4 hours (2:00 PM), the contest ends. Any source code in the “submit” directory may be compiled and run one final time.
  
• The team with the most successes wins. In a tie, the team with the fewest attempts wins. In a tie, the team with the least combined time wins.
  
• The faculty members (and any stray faculty who’d tagged along) form 1 or more teams of any size, and also compete. If they beat the winning student team, they are awarded “0th”, “-1st”, etc. place. If not, they are teased mercilessly for the next year.
  

The contest was very popular at my school for the years I was involved in it (1981-1983). Students vied to get on their school teams (at our school, team selection was entirely up to the faculty team member chosen that year, so if you weren’t clearly best on technical merit, blatant sucking-up could be required). The fact that we won 2 of those 3 years :cup: :hihi: didn’t hurt its popularity, either.

 

The contest was less popular among the faculty and administration of WV’s larger universities (WVU and Marshall) for the simple reason that they never won. The humiliation of the best of their 1,000 or so CS undergrads being trounced at the hands of small college Math, Chemistry, Business, and even Art:sculpture majors, some who were not even in 4-year programs, was nearly more than they could endure! Unsuccessful efforts were made to exclude non-CS majors, and even cancel the contests completely. The humiliation continued. Curiously, none of the big schools tried the obvious tactic of recruiting their own non-CS students, which I’m fairly sure would have spelled an end to the small schools’ dominance.

 

The last year I was in the contest (1983), a nearby, primarily 2-year college created its first CS degree program, and that year, brought 4 CS majors to the contest. Although this school had made a strong showing the previous years (3rd and 2nd place), that year, the plummeted to around 10th.

 

This, among other things, has long caused me to question the goodness of Computer Science as a separate academic discipline.

[Southtown]

LOL Makes me question teachers in general. Haha